Google has confirmed a new report claiming that it will not follow up its lackluster Pixel Slate. Google has exited the tablet market.

Computerworld’s JR Raphael writes that he learned just today that Google had planned to ship two smaller tablets this year but dropped those plans and will instead focus on laptops. The firm will continue to make new Pixel smartphones too, of course. (Raphael says that “Pixel phones and Pixel computers are [made by] two different departments” within Google.)

More important, Raphael says that Google confirmed the retreat.

“The news was revealed at an internal company meeting on Wednesday, and Google is currently working to reassign employees who were focused on the abandoned projects onto other areas,” he writes. “Many of them, I’m told, have already shifted over to the laptop side of that same self-made hardware division.”

Google also told Raphael that it was possible that the firm would follow-up its Pixelbook with a new laptop later this year.

As you may recall, this is the second time this year we’ve heard of problems in Google’s hardware business: Google was previously known to be scaling back its hardware ambitions and downsizing the group that makes its laptops and tablets.

“The issue isn’t whether Google is serious or not about hardware,” I wrote at the time. “It’s whether it can succeed in this effort. And it cannot.”

Tagged with Pixel Slate